QUOTE(Katajanmarja @ Nov 6 2020, 18:39)

*bow*
Thank you very much, that was exactly the kind of answer I was expecting.
Based on that, I think I am able to judge slaughter, battlecaster, illithid and banshee better than before. And as I stated, I already have enough experience of vampire, at least for my play style. What about balance, nimble and swiftness, how are those generally judged as (light-armor) melee suffixes, compared to slaughter?
As one-handed: it's pretty much slaughter or nothing at higher level, but nimble and balance are both viable at lower level, especially depending on what you have access to. Nimble offers parry that can otherwise be hard to stack up to a point where you're hitting your counter cap each turn. Balance is slightly less powerful since counters can't crit, but it matters less when you're lower level and dealing more of your damage with direct hits.
Two-handed prefers to use slaughter, as do dual-wield and niten ichiryu for their main-hand weapons, but again: at low level, anything goes. For off-hand weapons: balance is preferable for damage, nimble for survival.
In practice this means a high-level niten player may use a waki of the nimble for IW/fest, but balance is more than enough for arenas, and they can get IW easy enough that nimble may be overkill there too.
As for dual-wield... there are two optimal weapon setups depending on your purpose. A club of slaughter with a rapier of balance in the off-hand is the go-to for arenas, partly for the weapon procs (stunned monsters can't parry, and penetrated armor is still useful even when using imperil) and partly for the raw ADB. For harder content, a rapier of slaughter in the main-hand with a wakizashi of the nimble in the off-hand provides enormous parry chance.
Swiftness is not an especially good suffix because the attack speed granted by the suffix isn't that high compared to the normal rolls, and because it's only a small defensive bonus that doesn't match up to the enormous boost granted by nimble's parry chance - even moreso for dual-wield, with the off-hand parry bonus.